How about a Nelson visit Giovanni? We can watch the Azurri kick Bolivia's arse or something.

Heh... that'd be great. Who knows, maybe come 2011 I won't be quite so tied down by the little one and family circumstances. (Who am I kidding? Of course I will.) (Nelson is also the only place I've been to in the south island along with Takaka.) (Do you reckon it's going to cost $1400 to watch my rugby heroes clash with Bolivia?)

So the Warriors got twice as many for a practice game at North Harbour Stadium as the Blues got for an actual week 5 competition match tonight.

And SA are playing hard ball about starting the comp even earlier in the year.

Is it just me or the the NZRU completely and utterly fucked re the Super 14?

Going by previous form they will come up with another unsustainable effort that will result in them being even worse off in 5 years than they are now.

They are going to need to pull a miracle out of their arse. But who cares, nobody else does.

Rock on Warriors in 09.

And re the world cup, if other towns want to bitch about the number of games in Auckland I suggest they go out and find a few more people to live in them. People in Tauranga can drive to Rotorua, or Hamilton, or Auckland to either Eden Park or North Harbour Stadium. That's 4 grounds within 2-3 hours drive.

I love rugby union, I grew up with it and it is to me the most beautiful game in the world. But last night I watched the Blues/Cheetahs and the Warratahs/Brumbies game then switched between that last game and the Storm/St. George NRL game.

Professional team sports that are hugely popular - I am thinking mainly of 20/20 cricket, baseball, soccer, rugby league, and AFL but I think it is a safe general statement - share certain characteristics. They have simple rules that are easily grasped, and their very simplicity makes it difficult for partisan analysts and tacticians to bowdlerise the game. The game has a simple scoring philosophy. And the game is highly fluid making for an excellent T.V. spectacle. They are broadly divided into three sorts of game to my mind, running games (League), kicking games (soccer, AFL) and hitting games (baseball, hockey, and cricket). But these characteristics are not pre-requisites for a successful professional sport. In the United States in particular they seem to prefer highly stylised - almost ritualised - games that revolve around set piece moves. Although less popular, test match cricket retains a large following. So I don't think that rugby is losing crowds just because its game isn't as attractive as its competition.

So I don't think rugby per se as a game is the problem. It does have some major issues, in that its rules are struggling to adapt to make it a game that can create the sort of roll up the sleeves everyday professional product that reliably entertains with good players. Is it a kicking game? Or a running game? Is it a fluid game of movement or is it a game built on the set piece move? It is neither fish nor fowl. It is game currently most attractively played at the amateur or semi-professional level, or at the very, very highest level. If rugby were to go back to the rules of the 1970's - essentially a kicking game moving from set piece to set piece - it would have a logic and coherence that would simplify the rules and give the game a similar attraction to American Gridiron. If it were to go to a fully running game then it ought to merge with League into a possibly hybridised game. Certainly, I can't see anyway to fix up the tackle ball area short of bringing back full on rucking, which is unacceptable in the T.V. era and unacceptable given the size and power of players these days.

But really, the game on the field and its rules are only part of the problem, and in my view the least part. The problem is the whole package - game, season, presentation.

The NRL season makes sense; it has a defined beginning, middle and end. The structure of the NRL season gives an almost Shakespearean flow to the off field theatre and drama, and like all good plays everyone goes home both satisfied and looking forward to the next play. It is the centrepiece competition, where these days even state of origin is a distraction. It has a season 6-8 weeks shorter than the rugby union one, an important thing since it seems to be what makes all the difference between over-exposure and just right. By contrast, the Super 14 starts a month to early, the season meanders along with several peaks and troughs and putters out a month to late with an end of year northern hemisphere tour that does little more than devalue the All Black brand to a by then utterly over it domestic NZ audience.

Rugby Union's match presentation on T.V. in this country is light years behind the NRL's. It is so far behind and so pathetically bad that people here often turn down the volume and listen to the radio commentators. The Australian broadcasters who make up their commentary packages are engaged, interested, funny and above all always entertaining. They understand that when 99.999% of your audience is watching the game on telly they are as much part of the entertainment package as the referees or players. By contrast, the Sky TV rugby commentators are a mix of colourless journeymen and has-been ex-players. Their commentary style is exactly wrong - detached, disinterested and faintly bored observers. Sky don't appear to give a tinker's cuss that they have probably the worst commentators in the world, and as long as Sky retains an iron monopoly on the local pay TV market they have little incentive to change.

By contrast, the Super 14 starts a month to early, the season meanders along with several peaks and troughs and putters out a month to late with an end of year northern hemisphere tour that does little more than devalue the All Black brand to a by then utterly over it domestic NZ audience.

Hear hear! Can we have a season that climaxes with a big final, rather than all the best players buggering off overseas to play games that we have to watch at some ridiculous hour of the morning against players that we don't care about? Cheers.

(Except, hockey definitely isn't a hitting game, it should come under the same category as soccer. Boxing is a hitting game though...)

I know. It's insane. It's not as if I don't live in sight of the damn thing either. But it's the tethering to the old country that does it.

Your ties to Italy are preventing you from venturing to Kaikoura and below?

BoP is the most bitterly divided union in the country. The move to the Mount is a recent thing and is linked to Blue Chip finance sponsorship. Clarkson’s in the mix there somewhere too I think.

The ground where they play there is a speedway track and totally rubbish for watching rugby at, as well as being too small.

So, despite contributing most of the players, and having the much bigger stadium, Rotorua doesn’t get to host NPC (or whatever it’s called these days) rugby. A split where Rotorua joins up with Taupo is not far away.

Anyway, it’s not really fair on the travelling fans to ship them off to a retirement village and expect them to enjoy themselves.

Julie - me too.In fact was just talking about the closeness of the World Cup to the election due in November 2011 (if it doesn't happen earlier). Which will mean the WC will be heavily politicised.I also expect climate change will have become much more urgent issue by then much as the global economy has in the last year. So who knows what effect that will have? Perhaps everyone will be cycling between matches on the partially built cycleway.

At the risk of being guilty of "banging on about it", can I alert PASers to the opportunity for expat Kiwis in Sydney to support the White Ferns who play India tomorrow at North Sydney oval. I know tickets are cheap, $10, and plentiful. The oval also happens to be a ten minute train ride from city stations (Central, Town Hall and Wynyard). NZ have to win tomorrow to have much of a chance to make it to the final.